Potato is yum

I’ve read a lot of webcomics in the past few years and some of them I feel get very little recognition for how great they were. Among my list of favorites is Drug-Eating Genius Mage which is a webcomic translated by Asura a few years ago.

The story starts off like many other fantasy stories with a character basically showing off how powerful they are. In this case, the character is showing off their power against some demon king enemy which is also pretty standard in fantasy stories. We then find out that this is just some kind of game and see the main character create a new character in the game with some supposedly strong traits with very negative traits too.

This is actually one of the first webcomics to come up with this method for balancing an OPMC which made it an especially good read when I first started reading it a few years ago. Unlike in Solo Leveling where the constant power scaling and increasingly powerful characters caused a slippery slope of exponentially increasing power, the limits of the main character in Drug-Eating Genius Mage where very easy to define because the main character literally had to take drugs to stay alive. This meant there was an inherent weakness built into the character which the writer could use to create conflict more naturally.

However, just making an interesting mechanic to limit the power of your main character really isn’t enough to say it’s one of the best. The way the limiter plays into the worldbuilding helps reinforce the main character’s place in the story. We can see this example with another webcomic that I regularly follow which is Terminally-Ill Genius Dark Knight which is also translated by Asura. In this webcomic, the main character has to kill monsters to extend his lifespan. This sounds like a very good way to limit the main character’s power and initially seems like a way to generate conflict and for the most part it does do all of these however it doesn’t generate conflict as naturally.

So what do I mean by generate conflict naturally? In Drug-Eating Genius Mage, the main character has to strategically decide when to use what drugs in different situations. They main character also has to manage the source of his drugs to ensure he is able to sustain himself while also trying to improve his own ability. In Terminally-Ill Genius Dark Knight, the main character basically just needs to find an excuse to kill a bunch of monsters. The first few situations where this limitation is used at the beginning of the story show a great execution of this limitation but as the chapters have progressed the limitation can now be seen as more of a nuisance rather than a limitation as the main character has grown strong enough that the limitation feels annoying.

Both of these limitations feel the same as they interact directly with the ability for the main character to function in the story however the limitation in Drug-Eating Genius Mage makes the threat of the limitation feel linked to the world and less a mechanic that stands on its own.